Dented Reality

Author Archives: Beau Lebens

I am Beau.

WordCamp Savannah, 2010

I was lucky enough to spend last weekend in Savannah, Georgia for their first WordCamp. This was the first time I’d ever been to beautiful, historic Savannah. The humidity/heat was a bit much for me, but in general I had a great time. I gave a short presentation on the new comment_form() function which is [...]

Call Me N.E.R.T.

Prompted in equal parts by the book Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, the fact that I now live in an earthquake-prone area (and knew nothing about earthquakes) and by a personal interest in “Survivalism“, I recently attended a training course to become a qualified NERT Volunteer. NERT, or Neighborhood Emergency Response Team, is [...]

WordPress Plugins for Multiple Versions

If you’re a WordPress Plugin developer, you may find yourself in the unenviable position of needing to maintain one of your plugins across multiple versions of WordPress. Until recently, I maintained the IntenseDebate plugin for versions 2.5 and up of WordPress, including versions 2.6 of WPMU and up. That’s a lot of versions (10 actually, [...]

My Experience with the Vibram Five Fingers Shoes

Earlier this year, my brother got me a pair of Vibram FiveFinger KSO‘s for my birthday. They’re pretty freaky. Here are some random notes on my adventures with these shoes.

Lessons Learned

A few weeks ago I had a pretty rough time with something I was working on, so I thought I’d take the chance to share some lessons with you that I learned along the way. I’m taking these specifically from my experience as a developer of web-based systems, but I feel like at least some [...]

Proximity Detection on a Mac

I get really annoyed when I find myself having to do things over and over that a computer could easily do. I am also really bad at remembering to do small things that don’t seem that important. The latest intersection of these 2 things is that I’ve been forgetting (or not bothering) to set my [...]

Federated Social Web Summit

I’m in Portland today and taking part in the Federated Social Web Summit, before attending OSCON for the next week. Today is so far packed with lighting presentations from all sorts of companies, projects and protocols in the space to bring us all up to speed. After lunch we’re going to all be discussing and [...]

Dynamic Headings in WordPress

One thing that’s always bugged me in writing Posts/Pages content within WordPress is that you have to cater for different presentation possibilities. If you’re into web-standards, then that makes life difficult for things like headings (h1, h2, etc), when a block of content is presented in different contexts. Ideally, your page should be structured with [...]

GorillaPod iPad Stand

Last night, I purchased “Awaken“, a pretty cool clock/alarm app for my iPad. I wanted to try it out as a bedside clock, but to do that I needed a stand of some sort so I could stand up my iPad on my bedside table. My previous theory was that a simple business card holder [...]

WordPress 3.0

$ svn up Now running WordPress 3.0. This is going to be a game changer.